Linguistic ethnography

This paper makes the case for the continuing importance of literacy studies within linguistic ethnography, particularly given the nature of the kinds of societies in which we are working.  It underlines the importance of continuing to develop concepts and approaches for analysis of the textually mediated nature of the contemporary social world, in which the significance of communication in digital environments and multimodal communication have increased.

Focusing on developments in research on language education policy, this short paper begins with a sketch of the new problem space emerging at the intersection of intensified transnational mobility, expanding economic neo-liberalisation and the institutionalisation of multilingualism.  It then identifies situated practice, commodification and declining state authority as key perspectives and themes in the study of language policy, and outlines the methods required to address these.  After that, it provides an overview of the articles in which these issues are addressed.

In this article I comment on the fact that the Internet and social media are often depicted as orthographically unregulated spaces in public and political discourses on young peoples’ use of social media. I point out that adolescent Facebook users in fact do orient towards different norms of language use by means of self- and other-corrections. I argue that corrections of language use are about more than mere orientation toward linguistic correctness and I suggest that correction practices on Facebook provide information about social relations among the adolescents I study. By carrying out sequential analysis of Facebook interactions I demonstrate how the adolescents negotiate each other’s (linguistic) behavior and what norms are relevant in different situations.

Le volume traite de la médiation des savoirs sur le langage et l’appréhende sous deux aspects. D’une part, le volume propose quelques pistes pour mieux comprendre ce qu’engage de fabriquer des savoirs sur le langage lorsque la relation entre linguistes et public investigué est celle d’une attention mutuelle des deux parties plutôt que celle d’une position surplombante de l’une sur l’autre. D’autre part, il présente certaines manières par lesquelles les savoirs construits en sciences du langage sont diffusés par les linguistes auprès du public, qu’il soit professionnel ou ‘profane’, sans prétentions à en épuiser l’inventaire.

Le choix d’articuler ces deux aspects s’explique d’abord par le fait que la médiation des savoirs sur le langage, au contraire peut-être de nos a priori, ne s’observe pas seulement au moment de la communication, de la vulgarisation ou de la transposition des résultats mais tout au long du processus de recherche. Dans un cas comme dans l’autre, se réunissent autour de l’objet langage des instances aux positions épistémiques et sociales différenciées. L’articulation de questionnements relatifs à la fabrication et à la diffusion des savoirs sur le langage répond également à la préoccupation de sortir la recherche de sa tour d’ivoire pour en envisager les implications. Dans la perspective d’une science aux prises avec le monde social, et dans le prolongement d'une réflexion sur la co-construction des connaissances, la médiation des savoirs apparait comme une des conditions, un des moyens et une des finalités incontournables de la recherche.

Though of the same genre, two comparable proverbs from a given culture can operate in two distinct communicative spheres. Using an approach called discourse ecology, I explore the intertextual dynamics, semantics, and usage of two Kazakh proverbial calls to action. I consider the meaning and cultural background for each proverb. Based on searches of social media and a Kazakh corpus of news articles, I argue that one proverb operates in mass-media whereas the other is limited to use in interpersonal conversation and online chat forums. I conclude with considerations of the contrasting roles that the two comparable proverbs play in terms of representative and frame-aligning discourse for contemporary Kazakhs.

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

This is the extended introduction to my "habilitation", which summarizes and discusses five papers I published which draw on ethnographic fieldwork in the textbook publishing industry. I classify some production practices, but also argue that any classification breaks down in the face of the messy, entangled, case-specific practices of how "knowledge" is selected and made relevant in the daily practice of educational publishing houses.

It begins:
Textbooks, according to Ludwig Fleck (1935/80) and Thomas Kuhn (1962/96) will inevitably produce stable versions of dominant knowledge. Perhaps this is why the US State Department employs people to monitor other countries’ textbooks, “in an effort to understand better how their people think and what their governments want them to think” (The Economist, 2012). As a teenager, Bill Bryson suspected there was “a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting” (Bryson, 2003: 22). At the same time, school textbooks have been the site of intense controversies. In 2012, ...

This book provides a unique insight into negotiations around language investment for employability in the context of public employment services. Drawing on extensive ethnographical research carried out in Regional Employment Offices in Switzerland, the authors follow the stories of various job seekers. In doing so, they challenge the currently dominant assumption that investment in language competences leads to better employability. Arguing for a political economic perspective on these issues, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the connections between language and social inequality, as well as students and scholars of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

By Robert Cancel -- It is surprisingly difficult to tell a good story about storytelling. It is harder still to make the storytellers themselves come alive, helping their in situ oral performances flourish in text on a printed page. Robert Cancel achieves both of these goals, and more still. Storytelling in Northern Zambia is a masterful book in which Cancel grapples with collection, representation and fieldwork ethics, and a work that showcases the agency of his interlocutors (from the Foreword).

This PhD research study looks at meaning-making practices in interactions of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). In particular, two research questions are investigated: Which wordings and features of discourse are characteristic of interactions in contexts where English is used as a lingua franca, and how do they contribute to meaning-making? To what extent do successful ELF interactions require competencies, skills and practices which are additional to those already described in the literature, and how can they best be described and accounted for? The data comprised naturally occurring spoken discourse from international students who were holding meetings in order to establish an international student society at the University London, and were analysed qualitatively drawing eclectically on the analytic traditions of ethnography and conversation analysis. In the first analytical chapter, it was found that the students were making specific meaning through translanguaging, and this contributed to the achievement of the pragmatic functions ‘filling in a lexical gap’ and ‘using some more precise lexis’. In the second chapter, it was shown that the students were again translanguaging setting out to be polite by achieving the pragmatic functions ‘displaying discursive sensitivity through avoiding profanity in English’ and ‘increasing politeness through showing awareness of the interlocutor’s linguistic background’. In the third analytical chapter, it was yielded that the students negotiated the meaning of culturally contested expressions, and thus the functions ‘refining the culturally contested elements of an expression’ and ‘replacing a culturally contested expression altogether’ were achieved. Finally, in the fourth analytical chapter, what was argued was that there were instances in which the students were attempting to manage the relational and build rapport with their interlocutors with word play through the functions ‘making an idiomatic expression more relevant to the rest of the in-group’ and ‘making an idiomatic expression more relevant to a wider audience’. Subsequently, the implications of the findings were discussed from the perspective of their significance regarding revising communicative competence and related models of competence, reconceptualising language functions and social semiotics, and reappraising the practice of translanguaging in superdiverse contexts. Finally, it was shown that these findings could be pedagogically useful for English language planning and policy from the particular perspective of curriculum and syllabus design, coursebooks and materials development, teaching approaches and methods, and testing and assessment.

In this paper, I discuss and contrast the manner in which the notion of indeterminacy is theorised in contemporary sociolinguistics and integrational linguistics.
To appear in Adrian Pablé (Ed.). (forthcoming) Critical Humanist Perspectives: The Integrational Turn in the Philosophy of Language and Communication. Routledge.

This paper explores what the work of John Gumperz can contribute to our understanding of power relations in the 21st century.  It does so by emphasising the critical dimension of his work (Blommaert 2005; Rampton 2001), and by considering its relevance to Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’.  As a concept developed in his later work, governmentality hasn’t featured very prominently in explicit appropriations of Foucault in linguistics, but it cries out for interactional sociolinguistic analysis and it has been at the centre of discussion among social theorists about changing character of contemporary power.
To pursue this agenda – consistent with the larger programme sketched by Arnaut 2012 – I shall begin with the debate about whether and how Foucault’s work continues to be relevant, focusing on governmentality in particular (Section 1).  After that, I shall review the rather different ways in which US linguistic anthropology and (mainly) European critical discourse studies relate to Foucault’s later thought (Section 2), moving into a more detailed consideration of how John Gumperz’s work resembles some of the later Foucault’s, not just in its discursive constructionism but also in its attention to the ‘antagonism of strategies’ and its understated practice-focused politics (Section 3).  Next, I summarise the shifts in governmentality identified by Fraser, Deleuze, Rose and others, dwelling in particular on the new forms and functions of surveillance (Section 4).  In section 5, I return to Gumperz and interactional sociolinguistics, arguing that their tracking of real time attention and inferencing, their recognition of discrepant but hidden communicative preferences, and their critique of the legibility of populations, all remain highly relevant, although to cope properly with the new digital environments, challenging new types of analysis are needed.  But even without these, the Gumperzian framework can make an important contribution to understanding subjective experiences of digital surveillance, and the paper concludes with a sketch of what the empirical sociolinguistic study of contemporary governmentalities might look like.

Absztrakt Jelen tanulmány egy a heteroglosszia elméleti keretében végzett doktori kutatás módszertani alapjait részletezi. A kutatás roma gyerekek iskolai nyelvi gyakorlatait vizsgálja úgy, hogy az elemzéshez iskolában létrejött émikus kategóriákat veszi alapul. A kutatás célja az iskolába járó roma gyerekek beszédmódjainak és az azokhoz kapcsolódó társas jelentéseknek a megismerése. A heteroglosszia elméletének segítségével a beszélést több dimenzió mentén, a társas folyamatokra reflektáló és azokat alakító dinamikus cselekvésként értelmezem. Az interakciókban megjelenő társas jelentések feszültséget okoznak a beszédpartnerek között, ezáltal a társas jelentésekhez kötődő viszonyulások, ideológiák vizsgálhatóvá válnak. A feszültség az interakcióban a beszélők között jön létre, különböző nézeteik, ideológiáik, attitűdjeik szembenállásából fakad, ezzel befolyásolja a kommunikáció menetét. Dolgozatomban amellett érvelek, hogy a feszültség vizsgálatát célzó, a heteroglosszia elméletén alapuló jelen kutatáshoz nyelvészeti etnográfiai módszerek jelentik az adatgyűjtés lehetséges módját, mert az egyéni perspektíva megismerését célozzák és mert a beszélést kontextusában ábrázolják. A dolgozat felvázolja, hogy a nyelvészeti etnográfiára ható elméletek hogyan határozzák meg a beszéd vizsgálatának irányát, mely jó alapot nyújt a heteroglosszia elméleti keretében megfogalmazott feszültség elemzéséhez. 1. Bevezetés Kutatásom, melyhez ez a dolgozat kapcsolódik, iskolai környezetben vizsgálja a különböző csoportok közötti nyelvi diskurzusokat. A gyerekek beszédmódjai az iskolába kerülve az iskola nyelvi normái alapján értékelődnek. E szerint a tanárok általában egy egyetemes normához viszonyítva jellemzik a gyerekek beszédét, melynek eredményeként az egyetemes normától eltérő beszédmódok elmaradottnak, kevesebbnek értékelődnek. Kutatásom célja olyan szempontból megismerni és megragadni diákok nyelvi gyakorlatait az iskolában, mely nem kizárólag egy egyetemesnek gondolt normához képest kialakított értékelést jelent, hanem a közösségben létező szempontok, értékek és ideológiák figyelembe vételével történik. A nézőpont megváltoztatásával megismerhetővé válik, hogy a beszélői perspektívák közötti különbségek milyen feszültségekkel járnak az intézményi (tantermi) interakciók során. Az interakciós helyzeteket jelen kutatásban úgy értelmezem, hogy azokban a résztvevők beszédmódjai valamilyen viszonyba kerülnek egymással. Az így létrejövő viszonyok mindig kölcsönhatással járnak, melyek az egyes beszélőkben, illetve beszélők között feszültséget vagy akár konfliktust okozhatnak. Jelen dolgozat a módszertani kérdésekre összpontosít. A kutatás elméleti hátterével bővebben két másik tanulmányom foglalkozik. (A nyelvi hátrány koncepciójának elemzése és egy alternatív vizsgálati lehetőség bemutatása: Jani-Demetriou 2020a; a kétnyelvűségnek a heteroglosszia elmélete szerinti értelmezése: Jani-Demetriou 2020b.) A kutatáshoz az adatgyűjtés nyelvészeti etnográfiai módszerekkel, főként terepmunkán végzett résztvevői megfigyeléssel, tanórai hospitálásokkal és tanárok reflexióira fókuszáló interjúkkal történt. A beszédet időben és térben meghatározott, kontextushoz kötött és a diskurzus résztvevői által közösen létrehozott cselekvésként értelmezem. E szerint a megközelítés szerint a jelentésalkotás a beszélés komplex terében jön létre, ami a fenti paraméterek közötti erők (az egységesítés, sztenderdizálás felé irányuló és az ezzel ellentétes, az egyéni különbségeket, a kreativitást hangsúlyozó erők) működésének dinamikája mentén folyamatosan alakul. Ebből következően alapvetésnek tekintem, hogy a beszélők a közöttük kialakuló viszonyoknak maguk is alakítói, vagyis egy adott csoport a maga által kialakított viszonyok és kategóriák mentén értelmezi a tagjait (beszélőit). Ezen jelenségkör megismerését célozza az e dolgozat keretein belül bemutatott nyelvészeti etnográfiai módszereket alkalmazó vizsgálat.

This article engages with Archer's call to further research on reflexivity and social change under conditions of late modernity (2007, 2010, 2012) from the perspective of existing work on reflexive discourse in the language disciplines (Silverstein 1976, Lucy 1993). Drawing from a linguistic ethnography of the networked trajectories of a group of working-class South Asian youth in Hong Kong (Pérez-Milans & Soto 2014), we analyze the trajectory of Sita, a Hong Kong-born young female with Nepali background. In her trajectory, performative acts of ethnic minority-based activism emerge as key in the enactment of a given set of values, stances, types of persona and situated forms of alignment/disalignment. That is to say, Sita's enactment of activism is seen in this article as tied to a discourse register (Agha 2007: 147). As such, 'talking/doing activism' is inter-textually linked to a speech chain network of a group of secondary school students, teachers, researchers and community-based minority activists engaged with Sita in various interrelated projects for social empowerment. Analysis of interview transcripts, online chats and multimodal artifacts shows the extent to which the coordinated formation of this discourse register proved useful in providing Sita with relevant cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) with which she shaped her own academic trajectory, from a low-prestige government-subsidized secondary school to an elite international college.

Firstly, the Roman Catholic «prehistory» of contact between the Panoan groups of Bolivian Amazonia and Jesuit, Franciscan and lay clergy missionaries is described. The paper then analyses the continuity of the evangelization process by diverse evangelical denominations, describing three missionary experiences with the Chacobo since 1955 to the present day. Finally, general insights are proposed relating the anthropological problem of religious conversion.

The article is devoted to the examination of some translation problems conditional on the cultural context, including those related to the translation of realia (regarded in its broader sense). If considered sensu lato, the context (cultural, grammatical, etymological etc.) makes all equivalents relative, as it have been more than once noted by Russian and foreign translatologists.
In such a situation (every translation being an interpretation) a thick description is required, something like advocated by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. The analogy isn’t casual: the postmodernist ethnography and anthropology also focuses itself on the understanding of another culture and its re-interpretation in the own culture’s discourse taking account of the context and using the intertextuality.
On this basis it is also appropriate to consider the approaches to training the translators as the experience of teaching at the Translation Department of the RSUH’s Institute of Philology and History shows. The optimal formula seems to include forming these three qualities in the students: sensibility, erudition and aptitude for a creative usage of the translator’s own language. In this scheme a good interaction and combination of efforts of a compatriot and a native speaker teachers is vital.

This paper focuses on the urban graffiti painted with a political message by different
movements of the Italian political radicalism in the cities of Rome, Florence, Massa,
Carrara, Verona and Udine. For the purpose of this article, during the period from June
2011 to June 2012, a total of 165 graffiti have been photographed, of which 83 painted by
neo-fascist groups, 72 by extreme left groups and 10 by anarchist groups. These three
macro communities, made of different subgroups, emerged as the most active in expressing
their antagonism towards the parliamentary parties with their graffiti that combine semantic
(words) and semiotic (images) elements. An analysis of the collected graffiti’s language
form, meaning and context allows for the identification of the variety of styles of
communication adopted by the different political antagonisms and the different contents of
their communication through graffiti as well as the key elements of their political identities.
Key words: political radicalism, graffiti, linguistics

The lexicographic study of postcolonial language varieties is severely undertheorized and underdeveloped. Against that background, this paper develops a new framework, Postcolonial Lexicography. This framework aims at providing a new praxis of word definition for the study of creoles, world Englishes, and other languages spoken in postcolonial contexts. Drawing on advances in lexical semantics, linguistic ethnography and postcolonial language studies, the paper offers an original analysis of emotion words in Urban Bislama, a creole language spoken in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The paper develops a sketch of the Bislama lexicon of emotion and provides new definitions of kros, roughly " angry " , les, roughly " annoyed " and sem, roughly " ashamed ". The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is utilized as an interpretative technique for the definition of meaning. The NSM approach allows for a fine-grained lexical-semantic analysis, and at the same time, it helps circumvent " conceptual colonialism " and the related vices of Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism, all of which hamper advances in the field of lexicographic studies in postcolonial context. Résumé:

This article deals with the symbolic and material formation of an authenticated register of Övdalsk – a Scandinavian local language – unfolding in a situated engagement with grammatical artefacts. Seeking to refine the often underspecified category of the indexically ‘pre-shift,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘old’ or, in some other way, temporally authenticated register, it intercalates an analysis of linguistic exchanges with histories of production of authoritative discourse. Through a stepwise analysis of the production of metapragmatic discourse, it explores the indexically presupposing and entailing relationship between artefactual objectivation and novel registers of language. Thus examining the enregistering interpretation of genred regimentations of language-as-form, it argues that such focus is apt for creating a reflexive and less essentializing understanding of linguistic authenticity.

Keywords: authenticity; indexicality; enregisterment; metapragmatics; descriptivism; engagement

Presented 8 April 2016 at Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain conference at the University of Aberdeen:

Coined by Ernst Håkon Jahr as a sociolinguistic ’experiment’, Norwegian Nynorsk - the constructed written language based on Norway’s dialectal variation, created by Ivar Aasen in the 1800s - is one of two official written languages in the country. 

In this talk, I will present and introduce the linguistic activism which is strongly tied to the use and promotion of Nynorsk, particularly that of the Norsk Målungdom (the Norwegian Language Youth) – by going over their activities over the last year, we will look into how the organisation operates as well as how it tries to put linguistic and political questions on the agenda in today’s Norway.

As a matter of macrosociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological interest, I will touch on the following questions:

-​Has the linguistic activism of the Målungdom changed over time? If so, how and why?
-​Which issues relating to the use of Nynorsk in Norway have been prioritised?
-​Between 2015-2016, what did the Målungdom focus on and why?
-​Discussion: How could the linguistic activism behind Norwegian Nynorsk be of interest to linguists with a more structural and non-applied stance?

This presentation will be a reflection of the my interaction with the Målungdom as a member since September 2015. There will be reference to modern works and ideas in language planning and policy, sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography.

Megaliths feature commonly in the folklore of indigenous peoples all over their range of occurrence. At several places in South India, the authorship of megaliths is attributed to a now extinct race of dwarves, who were endowed with superhuman strength to heft the large stones into position, and who subsequently were annihilated in a rain of fire. We have tracked this legend at several megalithic sites and present a comprehensive list of sites in this paper, as well as the local names attributed to this dwarf race. We demonstrate that the appellation "Pandu" often associated with megaliths refer to this dwarf race, and not the Pandavas of Mahabharata, or the Pandyan dynasty, as often assumed. We also conjecture if a cultural memory of an extinct dwarf hominin species could form the basis of this legend.

Using an ethnography of speaking approach, this article discusses the ideological aspects of language practices, as they are played out in a traditional Yupik (Eskimo) village in Chukotka, in the Far East of the Russian Federation. The article shows how local linguistic practices and language choices of individual speakers intersect with purist language ideologies, which frame certain beliefs about languages and ways of speaking, making them appear more normal and appropriate than others. Placing the " work of speaking " within the context of cross-cultural dynamics and purist language economies, this article challenges the basic assumption of linguistic purism about language and identity being intertwined.

This article follows previous research arguing that skills of call center agents, which often include emotional labor, communication, procedural and substantive knowledge, and articulation work, are mostly invisible. Moving beyond previous analyses linking call centers to low-skilled standardized work, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and transpositional analysis in the Philippines and the UK to show which real-world processes and written practices make agents' skills not only invisible and illegible to industry outsiders but also their managers. I argue that textualization practices such as data entry and script work are important, and that deemphasizing quantification in favor of qualitative assessment could produce better outcomes for agents and skill appreciation by others.

The Chinese provinces are a crazy patchwork quilt of languages and dialects, where the histories of migrations and cultural enclaves, the tides of influence from empire and commerce, the sperm trails that follow rivers and railway lines ... are recorded in a tangle of codes that no one has yet made a serious attempt to untangle. Note that these comments are obviously informal, not a part of systematic research. Chinese scholars themselves are now (2013) taking a much more thorough interest in dialects than was the case even in 2000.

Chapter 5 studies janteloven ‘the Jante Law’, a much-cited but often misunderstood Danish cultural construct. The chapter explores the cultural semantics of janteloven and studies how the term functions in con-temporary Danish discourses. Through an original semantic exegesis, the chapter exposes stereotypes commonly associated with janteloven. It argues that the underlying values can be identified in accordance with, not in opposition to, dominant cultural discourses of “tender values” in Danish society.

Desde una perspectiva etnográfica y de análisis del discurso, el presente libro aborda la política de generalización del quechua en una región del sur andino en el Perú. Se analiza el nivel oficial de la política y la forma cómo los diferentes actores sociales involucrados la interpretan desde ideologías y prácticas particulares.

This paper is an attempted to narrate my story of certain attractors (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008) (i.e., translanguaging, Talmudic Pair Work, project work, Johari Window, Talking Stick, narrative study) that have shaped the dynamic spaces within and around my instructional practices in bilingual education. I have called these imbricated pieces from my history “chronotopic resonances” or “mashups” from different times and different places, and I have argued that they shape my classroom cultural practices for students of bilingual education in the Tejas borderlands. I have also argued that a fractal design, or infinitely iterative similarity is woven into the chronotopic resonances in what I do in my Tejas borderlands classes. This is a sort of de-coloniality in that it breaks up the impression of a nation-state hold on teaching and learning. It also breaks up the impression, I hope, that language is separate and singular and that the “bi-” in bilingual education is somehow like two nation-states.

Over the past decade, a new branch of sociolinguistics called Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS) has emerged, as an attempt to produce accurate and detailed inventories of urban multilingualism. LLS investigate the presence of publicly visible bits of written language: billboards, road and safety signs, shop signs, graffiti and all sorts of other inscriptions in the public space, both professionally produced and grassroots. LLS offer considerable potential as a first-line sociolinguistic diagnostic of particular areas; they can at the very least protect researchers from major errors; they compel sociolinguists to pay more attention to literacy; and they compel towards historicizing sociolinguistic analysis, at least when certain conditions are met. In what follows, we shall apply the tools of LLS to a particular space, the Rabot neighborhood in Ghent, Belgium. We shall use these tools in a particular way, however, and before engaging with the neighborhood we briefly sketch our own approach to LLS.

THE HĂRCOI OF HURS. PROBLEMS OF THE ETHYMOLOGISATION AND THE MYTHOLOGISATION IN THE HUMANITIES
Valery Stoyanov
(Abstract)

The Hărcoi are an ethnographical group located in the area of the cities of Biala and Russe in North-Eastern Bulgaria. They belong to the inhabitants of the plane – to the so called Polianci (“the meadow folk”) and are considered as an “old local population” (Yerlies – from the Turkish yerli “local” < yer “place”). Because of their conservative way of life and some particularity of the vernacular they often have been mocked by the neighboring groups. And their name was once interpreted in a pejorative sense as (h) ărcoi “fool; stupid, simple” from the Rumanian word răţoi “duck, drake; fool” by a metathesis of the first syllable. The designation of the Hărcoi as “a simple one, stupid (like a duck)” is a kind of a folk-etymology although it finds a support in the grammatical regularities of the Bulgarian language.

In the ethnographical research one often identifies the Hărcoi with the Polianci, i. e. they have been taken not as a part of the peoples in the Danube plane but as an equal denotation of them. This leads to the interpretation of both names from “field” – an explanation developed in the 1980ies by the folklorist Ivan Koev. He thought the Hărcoi were distant descendants of the Slavs inhabited the lands along the Mid-Dnepr river. Their movement in the 6th century a. D. toward the Low Danube led to the appearance of the Slavic tribe Poliani there. As a century later also the Protobulgarians came, the need of an ethno-cultural interactions required probably the literal translation of the Slavic name Poliani, Polianci (“the field people, the meadow folk” – from Slav. pole “field” or poliana “meadow”) into the Protobulgarian as Hărcoi – from *hăr (< Chuv. hĕr; Turk. qïr, kır) “field” + Turk. soy “stock, breed, ancestry”. So seemed the name Hărcoi to be a Protobulgarian loan translation of the Slavic Polianci in the meaning of the “people of the field, field stemmed ones, *hăr-soy”. A variant of this interpretation, trying to make it compatible with the “Iranian thesis” on the Bulgarian origin, appeared in the newer time. It uses instead of the Chuv. hĕr Iranian words for “field”, for instance the Ossetian hėrs. And the term Hărcoi would be developed then from * hėrs-soy (?) or *hėrs-oi (?).

A different starting point offers the explication of the name Hărcoi as a derivative from the name of Vladimir Rasate (or Hrăsate) – the son of King Boris, the Convertor. According to this version, the Hărcoi were descendants of clans who followed Vladimir in the attempt to throw off the new Christian faith. This idea of the late Bulgarian writer Jordan Vălchev found a wide echo among the Hărcoi community and if one regards in the form Hrăsate also an alternate variant Hărsate, then is only one step left to links it with the name of the old Slavic sun-god Hurs.

The first one who definitely connected the ethnographic group Hărcoi with the name of the god Hurs (Hărs) was the folklorist Ancho Kaloyanov. He announced 1998 that the name Hărcoi derives actually from hărsovi i. e. “belonging to Hărs (villages, lands, people)”. After exploring some place-names and other evidences, the scholar tried to prove the origin of the term Hărcoi from “the god’s name (“people of Hurs”, “Hurs’s people”)”.

Hurs or Hors was the name of a solar deity, honored by the Eastern (Russian) Slavs before their Christianization. He was mentioned in many old texts in connection with the pagan believe, some of them with Bulgarian “padding”. There is an opinion, that the name of Hurs was additional put in the oldest Russian chronicle after hearing about it in the city of Tmutarakan. If so, this leads us to the Khazarian-Bulgarian cultural sphere, whose traces beside the names of Tmutarakan and Sarkel (Šaru-kel, Belaia veža, d. i. Bel-gorod, “the white city”) include the designation of the Great prince of Kiev as kagan, too. The name of Hurs has an Iranian etymology. It is connected with the Pers. xoršîd (“sun”) < Mid Pers. xvaršēt < Old Pers. xwara-xšaētam < Iran. xwar-xšaēta (“bright shining sun”). In the first element one can see the common word for “sun, light, sunlight” in many I. E. languages. The N. Pers. xor means now “East” (where the sun rises from) and “an angel, patronizing the sun”. K. Menges supposes that the transition from xvare-xšaēta to Hurs could be appeared before the name was taken by the Slavs, in an Ossetic milieu. This hints at the possible way of the borrowing – from the Alani-Aorsi, ancestors of the future Ossetians. They have played an important role as militaries in the Khazarian Empire.

The hypothesis of Prof. A. Kaloyanov about the connection of the name Hărcoi with that of Hurs gained with the time a big popularity. Especially under the brighter public influenced by the mass media through loud poetical messages. The Hărcoi became “the pride children of the sun-god Hurs”, their name stemmed from the “Old-Bulgarian (or even “Proto Bulgarian”) name of the sun-god Hurs”, they were also “the former sun-worshiper, sons of Hurs”, and so on. So result the comparison of the two close sounding words in an imaginary construct, having the potential to “turn over” all our concepts on the essence of the preserved cultural heritage. There were not however any other data to support such a presumption.

Searching in an explanation of a particular ethnographic name is sometimes very useful to take into consideration also the known evidences about earlier ethnical groups, especially if they dwelled in the roughly same area, carried similarly designations and if one can suppose the presence
of an ethnically and linguistically continuity. There is such possibility also with the case of Hărcoi. Some years ago an attempt were made to derive this appellation from the name of the ancient tribe Carsi (Karsi), who migrate from Siret River to low Danube and mingled with the Slavic Anti and Sklavini. This altered their name Karsi (Karsali) into Hărsi (Hărsali). During the Slavic expansion in the 7th century the main group of the Harsi (Hărsi, Hărsali) came to the lands of the South-Eastern Bulgaria. They settled down around the present-day town of Rasgrad (Hrăsgrad) and the neighboring
village Hărsovo, who became the main tribe territory of the Hărsi, Hărsali – the future Hărcoi.

This new hypothesis has many obscurities. But it is more satisfying from the scientific point of view. Because the “truth” often wears simple and not so pompous clothing, in which one tries to pack it up on the way to our mind.

This paper foregrounds the concept of Spracherleben, the lived experience of language, in a contribution to ongoing debate about the conceptualization of linguistic repertoire in the context of mobility and migration. It discusses three perspectives on repertoire. The first is concerned with how we interact linguistically and socially, drawing on interactional and anthropological approaches. The second looks at how we are constituted as speaking subjects by historical/political discourses, drawing on poststructuralism. The third is inspired by phenomenology, addresses Spracherleben, and investigates the bodily/emotional prerequisites for speaking and experiencing of language. All three contribute to our understanding of repertoire, but in linguistics, the third remains under-researched. The paper elaborates on how a phenomenological view of the lived experience of language helps us to understand the discomfort or confusion that ensues if one suddenly finds oneself in an unknown sociolinguistic space, using the example of a girl who moves school from the country to the city.

The paper argues for extending linguistic landscape studies to also encompass the body as a corporeal landscape, or ‘moving discursive locality’. We articulate this point within a narrative of a developing field of landscape studies that is increasingly attentive to the mobility and materiality of spatialized semiotics as performative, that is, as partially determining of how we come to understand ourselves ‘in place’. Taking Cape Town’s tattooing culture as an illustration, we unpack the idea of ‘the human subject as an entrepreneur of the self, as author of his or her being in the world’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012: 23), by using a phenomenological methodology to explore the materiality of the body as a mobile and dynamic space of inscribed spatialized identities and historical power relations. Specifically, we focus on: how tattooed bodies sculpt future selves and imagined spaces, the imprint they leave behind in the lives of five participants in the study, and ultimately the creation of bodies that matter in time and place. The paper will conclude with a discussion of what studies of corporeal landscapes may contribute to a broader field of linguistic landscape studies.